Geographical Research最新文献

Geography is undergoing significant change in response to widespread higher education reforms. In this commentary, I reflect on how the discipline’s visibility and geographers’ security and sense of purpose are being reshaped by the likes of programme closures, organisational restructures, or pressures to mould academic priorities to others’ imperatives. These dynamics constitute a background condition that invites deep reflection about where and how geography might be reimagined—and for what ends. I argue that geographers must more actively position the discipline beyond academia by boldly asserting its relevance across public, private, and non-government sectors. I highlight the discipline’s distinctive capacities and consequence—not least among them spatial reasoning, relational thinking, civic engagement, and ethical responsiveness. These qualities make geography crucial for any who seek to deal with complex social, environmental, and political challenges. Ultimately, I call for a (geo)politics of care and radical collegiality among geographers as we navigate uncertain terrains, and stress that we have the ability and responsibility to shape those same terrains. Reinvention is challenging, energising, and purposeful, and this moment offers the possibility to safeguard geography’s enduring civic and intellectual values.

Proposed “nature positive” revisions to the Australian Government’s environmental legislation would further entrench an anthropocentric conception of nature as a commodity able to be metricised, traded, and/or replaced. The proposed legislation also manifests a form of speciesism, focusing on threatened species at the expense of other animals whose habitat would continue to be destroyed, and fails to account for future likely changes in the survivability of various species. Moreover, it takes little account of the suffering of individual animals nor the agential role of animals, plants, rocks, and mountains in more-than-human world-making, thus placing those nonhumans in abjection—that is, accorded no moral considerability. Using the Australian case to anchor our discussion, we conclude that truly “nature positive” approaches to the environment require a shift in emphasis from principally enabling “sustainable” exploitation of resources by humans, toward a focus on sustaining the multitude of context-specific, intensely relational networks of humans-other-than-humans. These relations engender a responsibility on the part of humans, when intervening through legislation, policy or practice, to pay deep attention to the specifics of nonhuman standpoints, subjectivities and relations with place—ground truthing—so that greater knowledge and critical, less anthropocentric thinking can underpin more ethical regulatory frameworks.

Lifestyle migration and existential threats of the climate crisis are unified through the need for escape. Geographical imaginaries of distant, pristine refuges not only define contemporary relationships with these phenomena, but these imaginaries have their inception in colonialism. Research into how geography and colonial history influence imaginaries of escape is underdeveloped. This article uses the Australian island state of Tasmania to address this gap through a critical discourse analysis of online news articles, travel blogs, and history texts. These texts sample the Tasmanian archive and popular cultural discourses about Tasmania’s identity. Martin Polin’s bunker, the Earth’s Black Box project, and tourism and tree-change emerge as key sites for showing how Western geographical imaginaries of Tasmania are reciprocally related to escapism. Analysing the archive through these texts reveals what place identities are deemed desirable in Tasmania, why and by whom, and illustrates how they are unequally distributed. Investigating escapism in Tasmania offers opportunities for similar analyses in other setter colonies and wilderness places, begins conversations about the relationships between apocalypticism, tourism, and migration, and asks how we may decolonise them.

Environmental crisis, socio-spatial inequalities, and geopolitical turmoil: geography’s relevance has never been greater. Yet, paradoxically, the discipline of geography in Australia faces diminished public appreciation, semantic and substantive elimination from university programs, falling school enrolments, and the challenges of out-of-field teaching. Against this backdrop voluntary, community-based learned societies (VCBLS) such as Geography Victoria, the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia, and the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland bring people, passion, networks, and energy to the discipline. These community organisations promote the intrinsic value of geography, advocate for educational reform, foster original research, cultivate public engagement, and inject crucial resources into the discipline’s future. Given their membership, past and current contributions and scope for more, dynamic, thriving, and professionally appreciated and professionally supported voluntary, community based learned societies are not only vital to the revival of the discipline of geography in Australia but are supportive of broader local, state, and national communities. This paper urges practising geographers (including teachers) and the professional associations that represent them to engage with VCBLS for individual and organisational mutual benefit and for the future wellbeing and sustainability of Australian geography.